Wilhelm Sasnal

Factory

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Wilhelm Sasnal
Factory
2000
Oil on Canvas
101 x 101cm

Painted from a famous propaganda image, Wilhelm Sasnal’s Factory swaps the celebratory ideal of the Socialist Worker for the impersonal hardness of mechanised production. Sasnal treats painting as a reductive process: information is lost in translation from photography to painting.

Using the original photo’s black-and-white tones, details are eradicated through heightened contrast, the image simplified through ‘overexposure’ and the intervention of the artist’s hand. Wilhelm Sasnal’s replicated images are dissociated from their once powerful meanings: they exist only as mere vestiges of themselves.